Merkley, Paul Charles, 'Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel', Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001, रेविएव बी सम.

Merkley, Paul Charles, 'Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel', Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-7735-2188-7, 266p.
Paul Charles Merkley is an Emeritus Professor of History at Carleton University in Canada. The Author is a self-confessed Christian Zionist for whom all that the State of Israel and her pro-Zionist allies stand for, have been divinely ordained to be so. This book seeks to continue the Author’s previous research work titled, ‘The Politics of Christian Zionism, 1891-1948’. (London, Frank Cass, 1998) He was also a Visiting Professor in Comparative Religion and American Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a posting that goes a long way in revealing his ideological convictions.
As understood by the title, the book under review seeks to analyse Christian attitudes towards the state of Israel from a perceptibly and very marked Western point of view thereby rendering the book almost ‘untouchable’ for readers not schooled in the Author’s philosophical stand point. He makes the common Western mistake of classifying only the Jews as Semites and consequently ‘anti-Semitism’ as applying to the Jews alone. One wonders what he takes the Arab people to be! The book is divided into 8 chapters with headings intended to create in the reader an apologetic attitude towards the state of Israel as a nation of rebirth and adventure (p.9) in the classic traditions of the early American frontier state.
The Author in his introduction takes as a vindication of his published views, the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. One can only wonder at his prophetic powers, in that case! His ire against the World Council of Churches (WCC) a.k.a. the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC), a politically left leaning ecumenical grouping of over 400 of the world's churches based in Geneva, Switzerland, appears again and again in the work. The Authors’ religious views become quite apparent in the introduction where he states (p.4) that in agreeing to the formation of the state of Israel, the nations of the west were also 'blessed'.
The first chapter is a flowery description of the origin of the state of Israel with a number of factual errors in it. He begins his narrative by stating that Israel is the only non-Arab state in the Middle East, a common mistake on the part of Westerners who forget about Iran, but not what one would expect from a university history Professor. The Author interprets the Palestinian refugee issue in terms of the massive refugee flows that took place post-World War II as millions of people found themselves on the wrong sides of newly drawn up borders. He goes on to narrate the early birth-pangs of the nation as debates raged on which direction the state of Israel should tilt, the secular Western democratic model or some sort of Jewish theocratic status.
In his second chapter, the Author seeks to address the attitude that Christians took towards the state of Israel from 1948 up to the 1960s. Surprisingly, Merkley seeks to compare the state formation of Israel to that of the WCC-World Council of Churches, an ecumenical grouping of world churches that he then proceeds to revile from the bottom of his heart (p. 26). His hatred of the Ecumenical movement springs mainly from the support given by the WCC to the Third World liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s.The about turn affected by the European Ecumenical Movement in the latter part of the 20th century seems to have been a cause of particular bitterness for the Author. He devotes a considerable amount of space to the WCC, much more than would seem warranted in a study of this sort.
The Author starts his third chapter with the rather blatant (and quite racist, I should say!) assumption that that the readership of this book would be limited to mainly English-speaking Christians from the Western world. He then proceeds to describe in detail the semantics of Eastern Christianity from a pronounced Western standpoint. Merkley makes some shocking generalisations and overstatements about Eastern Christian attitudes towards the West that reveal nothing but his total ignorance and aversion about the East (p.52) He goes on to quote some very dubious statistics (p. 57) to show that Christians have been doing well and actually prospering in Israeli controlled areas of former Palestine (though he acknowledges that Arab Christians have migrated to the West in large numbers ), while the conditions of Christians in Palestinian Authority controlled areas as well as the remaining of the Arab Middle East (AME) have been deteriorating continuously. The Authors unfortunate tendency to allow his feelings to run away with him is very evident in this chapter and one wonders how an established Academic could allow himself to get away with this sort of activity. His writing style often descends to nothing better than yellow page journalism. One of the surprising pictures that one is left from this chapter is that it would be a cardinal sin for a Palestinian Arab Christian to become a Bishop of his Church and also be a nationalist at the same time. Merkley offers an outright critique of Palestinian contextual theology which in turn has been heavily influenced by Latin American liberation theology in order to find a solution to the ongoing conflict from a nationalist theological perspective. He also goes to great lengths to prove that Christians in the Palestinian territories are being terrorised to the extent that they are quitting the West Bank and Gaza in larger numbers than when the Israelis ruled the roost (this of course refers to the period before the arrival of Sharon and the retaking of the territories), without taking into consideration the economic and military strangulation that the Israelis have been applying on the territories over the last five- ten years or so. Merkley ends the chapter with a ringing condemnation of what he purports to see as the late President Arafat’s double-voiced use of the term jihad and offers a view that a future Palestinian state can never be secular as to quote him, “on the Middle Eastern scene, ‘complete religious freedom’ is an alien species.”(p. 93).
The fourth chapter in the book is an anomaly due to its size, being just nine pages long in a book where the average chapter size is at least thirty pages. One wonders if the reason for this is because the subject of the chapter deals with that peculiar species of Arab people called the ‘Palestinians’ who the Author (like former Israeli Premier Golda Meir) feels did not ever exist at one time. Without taking into consideration the fact that human identity in every nation on earth has been a process of self creation, nothing (possibly) more evidently successful than in Israel itself, the Author proceeds to invest Palestinian nationality and nationhood with every degree of suspicion as some sort of illegitimate or artificial creation that sprang up yesterday and will in all probability die tomorrow. The Author then proceeds to denigrate the Arab/Muslim claim to Jerusalem when compared to the so-called Judaeo-Christian one and again quotes dubious statistics to prove that there was always a Jewish majority in the Old City of Jerusalem. One cannot but wonder how this was possible given the known history of the city. Merkley controversially states that ‘at least one-half of the Muslims resident in the city in 1948 had arrived there after 1920’ (p. 99). It is quite obvious from the totally biased nature of the information in this chapter that Merkley has culled his sources from some Israeli or Zionist history book. He even goes to the extent of ridiculing a senior Israeli statesman like Shimon Peres because he rationalises the development of a Palestinian national identity (p.101).
Chapter five is possibly the most important in this book as the Author seeks to convey his understanding of how Islam views both Christianity as well as Judaism. The Author again takes the war into the WCC-MECC camp as he seeks to prove that the so-called fallacy of Muslim-Christian dialogue. Interestingly the Author goes to the extent of comparing his own analysis of the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) policies towards the religious minorities of the Arabian Peninsula with the late President Arafat’s statements regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. One cannot but feel that Arafat, if he had the chance to read this book, would really felt elevated at such a comparison! The Author however proceeds with such a comparison to show what he (unfortunately) considers to be the devious nature of the Muslim mindset as (apparently) evident in these two individuals. The Author proceeds to denigrate the entire historical account of the glorious age of Islamic civilization, particularly those aspects that dealt with Christian and Jewish relations under the Caliphs, implying that the commonly accepted interpretation of this period as one of largely benevolent protection of the ‘Dhimmi people,’ is a fraud. The Author’s virulent bias against Muslims and anything Islamic is openly evident in this chapter where he claims that so-called Moslem terrorism in Lebanon is determined to reduce the number of Christians to zero (p. 128), a claim so widely of the mark as to sound positively ludicrous if not childish. He goes on to make a comparison between Christianity and Islam based on modern Western Christianity’s secular liberal image which naturally shows Islamic views and concepts in a very derogatory light indeed, again part of an imaging on the Author’s part that was intentional.
Merkley devotes his next chapter which is number six to the Roman Catholic Church and its relations with Judaism and the Zionist movement in general. The Author’s protestant roots are quite evident in this chapter that also shows bias towards Catholics and the Pope. Merkley evidently has a long hate list that excludes only fellow pro-Zionist and fundamentalist Christians as well as Zionist Jews. The Author resorts to ‘reporting’ tactics again in this Chapter without bothering to produce any adequate analysis of the Catholic Church’s policies vis-à-vis the state of Israel. He gives too much attention to the Pope’s visit to the Holy Land in 2000 and gets particularly nasty about what he interprets as snubs that the Pope suffered at the hands of Muslim higher clerics in Jerusalem. One is again amazed that any purportedly responsible and distinguished Academic from a major Canadian university could unashamedly and viciously put down such details in black and white. He openly accuses the Vatican of apostasy at having allied itself with the Muslim world in withdrawing recognition from the State of Israel for such a long period. (p. 153).
Merkley comes into full form in his seventh Chapter which is given over to a description of the author’s pet hobby of Christian Zionism as well as its antithesis, which is Anti- Zionism. He starts the chapter with a short history of what came to be known as liberal protestant pro-Zionism (1940s-50s) of the sort that supported the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The Author has divided the chapter into a number of sections dealing with either a prominent individual or organisation of both Zionist and anti-Zionist Camps. He gives a disproportionate amount of space to record the entire life history of a man called Dr.G. Douglas Young and the Institute of Holy Land Studies that he established in Jerusalem in 1957. Obviously this was a man who had influenced the Author a lot by his life’s work in support of the Zionist state. Organisations such as Bridges for Peace and the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem (ICEJ) are also given a lot of floor space in order to emphasize the relative importance of these organisations to the project at hand which is to ‘project’ the Christian Zionist perspective on Israel to an (admittedly) Western audience. The Author finds space in the chapter to carry on his personal pet feud with the ecumenical Church organisations in the Middle East, namely the WCC/MECC Combine and defines them as the main ‘perpetrators’ as it were of Christian anti-Zionism in the region and indeed in the world at large. Probably as a result of the Author’s deep interest in anything Zionist and as a consequence anti-Zionist also, this chapter appears to be the best researched of all the chapters in this book. Contrary to what we are led to believe from Christian News networks in America and elsewhere, the Author ends the chapter with a warning of foredoom that Christian anti-Zionism is rapidly eating into the American and Western Evangelical Christian spectrum.
Merkley concludes his highly controversial work with an analysis of Christian support for Israel within contemporary American politics. Merkley treads on dangerous ground when he accuses those anti-Zionist Christians who do not support Israel’s policy towards Palestinians as being anti-Semitic (pages 207 and 216). His statement that “millions of Christian Zionists look upon Israel as one key to the survival of the Judaeo-Christian Civilization” is highly dangerous (but also probably unfortunately true). Again his frequent use of Israeli terminology like ‘Eretz Israel’, ‘Judea and Samaria’ and his total refusal to refer to the Palestinian people as human beings suffering under the worst form of military occupation imposed on them by a regime that is hell-bent on destroying their status as a nationally recognizable people, all openly show on what side of the boat, our Author prefers to sit. Merkley’s command over language and his usage of the choicest epithets in describing self-perceived enemies is quite admirable given the rhetorical and wandering nature of this book. It is therefore a pity that more effort was not taken with the editing of the work, for the book is positively encumbered with word errors and inconsistencies. The transliteration of many common Arabic words such as Shar’ia (pages 84, 91 and 92) Qu’ran (p.105) and Dhimmi (p. 108) is wrong. One feels sad to read the last sentences of the book in which the Author contemptuously pushes aside all the work that the ecumenical movement within Christianity has been trying to achieve over the last thirty-forty years, namely to bring about greater dialogue within the Church as well as greater inter-faith dialogue. This was envisaged by the religious leaders as a preliminary step in the long process of fostering greater understanding and co-operation among cultures and religions with an aim of solving world conflict and alleviating poverty to create a better world for us all. Obviously the Author feels that all this is as much hog-wash. One can only pray that the Author may come to his right senses one day.